The America Invents Act increases the benefits of
participating in open source in two ways.

First of all, defensive publication
becomes a much more powerful tool. The First
To Blog rule means that a blog post or other
publication is more likely to count as prior art,
since a patent applicant can't claim an earlier
invention date to beat it. Although it is possible
to do defensive publication of just documents
while keeping the code itself secret, it's less
administrative overhead to just open source as much
as possible.

AIA also provides for a challenge system, which will be
difficult for most companies to use independently.
Industry organizations will probably have a new role in
challenging patents that attack their members. The
EFF is already doing this for 3D printing
patents.

Open-source licenses require different degrees of
reciprocity from a licensee. In this list, each
license category includes the same basic terms as
the previous category. I'll leave out the corporate
vanity licenses, since they aren't typically adopted
by new projects.

No reciprocity: new BSD, MIT. These licenses simply
grant permission to copy the software, and disclaim
warranty.

Patent reciprocity: Apache. In order to redistribute
software under this license, a licensee must offer a
license to any of the licensee's patents that apply.

Partial copyright reciprocity: Mozilla Public License,
Lesser GPL. A licensee must provide source code for
changes to the original work, but can still add code
that is somehow kept distinct from the original, and
keep it proprietary.

Broad copyright reciprocity: GPL (all versions). If a
licensee distributes a modified version that
constitutes a "derivative work" for purposes of
copyright law, that derivative work must be available
in source code form.

Protections from complex legal schemes: GPLv3. Some
patent trolling schemes and code signing systems have
the effect of working around the reciprocity
requirements of the GPL. This later version of the
license closes some loopholes.

SaaS reciprocity: Affero GPL. The only commonly used
license that requires a licensee to redistribute source
even if the code is not actually redistributed.
Offering AGPL-licensed software for use over a network
also triggers the requirement to redistribute source.

Unlike the RISC Unix boxes from back in the day,
a typical PC-architecture server is a Purchasing
Manager's grab bag of cheap parts available on
attractive terms. As an OS developer, you don't
know what weird mix of hardware you're going to have
to support, even if you're part of the OS team at
the hardware vendor. ("Hey, it turns out that the
new server is going to have RatBag 2000 Ethernet
cards after all. That's not a problem, it it?")
This situation was even worse when more parts were
on PCI cards, not the motherboard.

So in order to make an OS that will run on all the
bastard spawn x86 servers out there, you need to have
either (1) the market power to make the hardware
vendors code and test the drivers for you to support a
stable driver ABI, as Microsoft did for Windows NT, or
(2) the hacker chutzpah to break incompatible drivers
frequently, so that in order to work at all, a driver
has to "live in the tree" and be maintained as part of
the OS. This is the route that Linux chose.

Projects outside the kernel began adopting Git shortly
after its release. A key landmark in Git adoption
came when Keith Packard, one of the lead developers
of the X Window System, published two influential
articles in 2007.

Flushing without paying flushright
royalties ruins economic dignity. It doesn’t
necessarily deny the plumber any form of income,
but it does mean that the plumber is restricted
to a real-time economic life. That means one gets
paid to install or repair, perhaps, but not paid for
plumbing one has done in the past. It is one thing
to plumb for your supper occasionally, but to have
to do so for every meal forces you into a peasant’s
dilemma.

The peasant’s dilemma is that there’s
no buffer. A plumber who is sick or old, or who has
a sick kid, cannot work and cannot earn. A few
plumbers, a very tiny number indeed, will do well, but
even the most successful real-time-only careers can
fall apart suddenly because of a spate of bad luck.
Real life cannot avoid those spates, so eventually
almost everyone living a real-time economic life
falls on hard times.

Meanwhile, some third-party spy service
like a social network or search engine will invariably
create persistent wealth from the buildings and
activities made possible by the plumbing. A plumber
living a real-time career without the cash flow
from coin boxes on stalls, is still free to pursue
reputation and even income (through repairs, upgrades,
etc.), but no longer wealth. The wealth goes to the
central server.

The next time that you think about the hassle of being
unable to flush the commode because your smartphone
has an incompatible plumbing app, remember how
the Framers in their wisdom gave exclusive rights
to plumbers to protect them from misfortune.
Similarly, local authorities have created exclusive
rights to operate taxis. But as the global precariat
grows, how can we give more workers the kind of
automatic retirement and disability plan that
flushrights can provide?

Attention people of the Internet. The links to
EXAMPLES OF REALLY GOOD STUFF FOUND VIA RSS will
continue until you quit it with the "RSS is dead, it's
all about [chat site du jour]" posts. That is all.

Alastair Johnston: Opinion
Column: Why Won’t Helvetica Go Away?The
stark sans-serif look that had first symbolized
revolution in the hands of Russian typographers in
1917 became institutionalized as the bland face of
corporate smugness.

We have an information gap for discussing the ad
targeting problem. There are papers that, if you
put them together, help substantiate the argument
that adtech is bogus. But they're behind paywalls.

Here's a good one. "I'm not a high-quality firm,
but I play one on TV" by Mark N. Hertzendorf.
RAND Journal of Economics, vol. 24, number 2,
summer 1991. $24 to download. I have a copy
because I helped Doc Searls with some research for his
book, The Intention Economy,
but you probably don't. (I promise I'll get
to the Open Access rant some other time. Yes, “closed
data means people die” but we'll talk about
that later.)

Advertising is a form of signaling.
Rory Sutherland, vice-chairman of Ogilvy Group, said,
To a good decision scientist, a consumer
preference for buying advertised brands is perfectly
rational. The manufacturer knows more about his
product than you do, almost by definition. Therefore
the expensive act of advertising his own product is
a reliable sign of his own confidence in it. It
is like a racehorse owner betting heavily on
his own horse. Why would it be “rational” to
disregard valuable information of that kind?

But advertising can break down as a signaling
method when the medium is noisy enough that the
probability of an individual user seeing an ad is
low enough. Hertzendorf writes, Furthermore, the
noise complicates the process of customer inference.
This enables a low-quality firm to take advantage of
consumer ignorance by partially mimicking the strategy
of the high-quality firm. That's in an environment
where the presence of many TV channels makes it harder
for the audience to figure out who's really trying
to signal. Noise helps deceptive sellers.

But what happens when we introduce targeting? Let's
give the low-quality seller the ability to split the
audience, without the audience members knowing, into
marks and bystanders, with marks receiving the ad at
higher probability. In that case, marks receive the
signal of a high-quality seller, and the bystanders
receive the signal of the low-quality seller.

Something that I just figured out from going over this
paper again is that the splitting of the audience
doesn't have to be accurate in order for adtech
to work. Rebecca Lieb, at iMediaConnection, points
out that her BlueKai profile is largely false, and writes,
If ad platforms aren't delivering the targeting
that advertisers are paying for, the emperor has
no clothes.

Au contraire. Ad platforms are doing their work
just fine. Targeting works even if it's inaccurate,
as long as it can reliably split the audience.
Even the most basic cookie scheme will do that.
An ad network can randomly call some users left-handed
and others right-handed, or divide them by height,
or whatever. The only important thing is to split
the audience persistently, so that some have a higher
probability of receiving an inaccurate "high-quality"
signal from a deceptive seller.

Where sellers in Hertzendorf's scenario must rely on
increasing noise in the medium in order to deceive,
targeting lets them make the first move.

We're still in the early stages of the game, though.
If an individual is aware that targeting is possible
and doesn't know if he or she is mark or bystander,
the signal is lost. So you get the effect that I
think is happening in web advertising, with the value
of the entire medium going down, even for advertisers
who do not target.

However, some buyers are still unaware of the
extent of targeting. One politician saw an ad for a
dating site on a political party press release
and attributed it to the party, not to the Google ad
service used on the site where he read it.

From my point of view inside the IT business,
a lot of the adtech stuff looks old and
obvious, but some of the audience is still
figuring it out. People already detest and block the
email spam that the Direct Marketing Association
worked so hard to protect, because that's
obviously "addressed to me." Understanding web
ad targeting is taking a lot longer, which is
understandable because it's so complex. (see bonus
links below for introductions to the current state
of the art.)

The signaling power of an ad campaign is the
seller's advertising expense as estimated by the
buyer. Advertising that is itself costly, such as
celebrity endorsements or signs in high-cost areas,
has what you might call "creative signaling power."
Advertising that is attached to a high-cost medium,
such as Vogue magazine or the Super Bowl, has "media
buying signaling power". And there's a multiplier
effect from the quality of the ad itself, since
some ads are more memorable than others and tend to
make people think that they've seen them more often.
(so quality does not map directly to "informative"
or "entertaining".)

When an ad appears in a medium that facilitates
targeting, the media buying signaling power tends to
go away, depending on the accuracy of the targeting and
the audience member's knowledge of the extent of
targeting.

Brand advertisers, who Doc
Searls splits out from direct
response advertisers, seem to have
an understanding of the targeting problem. John
Hegarty, founder of the ad agency Bartle Bogle
Hegarty, said, I'm not sure I want people to
know who I am. I find that slightly Orwellian and I
object to it. I don't want people to know what I drink
in the morning and what I drink at night. I think
there's a great problem here - throughout history
we have fought for our freedom to be an individual,
and you're taking it away from us. I think there'll
be a huge backlash to that and Nike will have to be
very careful.

On the audience side, we have the feeling of "creepy",
which is hard to pin down, but that I think is an
important notification from your inner economist
about an information imbalance, which you would be
mistaken to ignore.

So here, roughly, are the rounds of the adtech game.
It would have been an interesting experiment to play
them out in order, but this is a real-time strategy
game, not a turn-oriented game. Some players have
gotten to round 3, and others are still on round 1,
or think they're on round 1 and are getting beaten
at round 2.

Round 1: Targeting that partitions the audience
without the audience's knowledge. Need not
be accurate because a persistent split is
enough to attract low-quality sellers. I'm
using "low-quality" in the economics paper
sense, not the "haha your phone sux and mine
r00lz" sense. Most adtech people are not in it to deceive,
but from a misguided quest
for efficiency that follows from a lack of
understanding of signaling.

I turned this in last week and forgot to link here: The
America Invents Act: Fighting Patent Trolls With
"Prior Art". The America Invents Act changes a
bunch of what we took for granted about patent law.
Disclose early! (Maybe the next step beyond
continuous deployment is continuous defensive
publication. What? It could happen.)